Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant-By 1884, Ulysses S. Grant, former President of the United States and greatest Union general of the Civil War, was both dying of cancer and so deeply in debt that he had been forced to put up his Civil War medals as security for personal loans. In that year, he began to write his memoirs an undertaking the modest Grant had always before resisted in the hope that the resulting royalties might in some measure help to provide for his family after his death. They did so handsomely. Grant completed the manuscript a few days before he died on July 23, 1885, and when the work was published later that year (by a firm partly owned by Grant's friend Mark Twain) it was an immediate bestseller, ultimately netting Grant's widow the then-enormous sum of $450,000. But the Memoirs were far more than just a commercial success. As the Columbia Encyclopedia now puts it, "Solid and unpolished as Grant himself, these memoirs rank among the great military narratives of history." The Memoirs cover only the first 43 years of Grant's life and deal mainly (over 80 percent of the original 1,216-page printed text) with the Civil War. Fast-paced, colorful, lucid, and laced with flashes of humor, they provide the most authoritative of all contemporary accounts of such pivotal events as the taking of forts Henry and Donelson, the Battle of Shiloh, the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns, the final advance on Richmond, the siege of Petersburg, the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, and Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House in 1865. Along the way, Grant finds time to give us some bluntly candid and occasionally devastating-assessments of the character and abilities of the political leaders and commanders on both sides of the lines. All these subjects and more are included in this handsomely illustrated abridgement of the Memoirs. In addition, for the sake both of continuity and completeness, all topics that are not covered in the excerpts presented here are supplied by the editor. And, with the exception of a few modern battle maps, all of the hundreds of photographs and drawings that grace this new edition are drawn from historically contemporary sources. The result is a worthy introduction to one of the great classics of military literature.